If you’re not familiar with the works of Alex de la Iglesia, the best way to describe his cinema is if you mix up Alex Cox with Troma and occasionally gave them higher aspirations than just doing grindhouse. His best known feature may be Dance with the Devil, aka Perdita Durango. Perdita Durango is based on 59 degrees and Raining, the third book in the Sailor and Lulu series, which started with Wild at Heart, which was adapted by David Lynch. Perdita Durango was just as strange as Lynch, even if not quite as successful.

De La Iglesia, however, has been churning out cult movies that reached a cinematic apex of insanity with The Last Circus, which was visually stunning, and psychotic as all get out. Any movie which features psychotic clowns and melting a face shown in a visual style reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth is gold in my books.

Which brings us to Witching and Bitching, another psychotic hyperactive horror comedy that comes close to the heights of Peter Jackson in his cult heyday of Dead Alive. Witching and Bitching follows the plot of 3 men and a son trying to escape to France but end up trapped in a town of witches.

Witching and Bitching opens with a riff on Macbeth’s witches scene, where three witches are foretelling the future over a cauldron, and parceling out random plot clues like an improv troupe pulling from a hat. But, the next scene brings it all to fruition as a bunch of guys posing as street performers (including Spongebob Squarepants and Jesus) rob a gold exchange store with a young boy, and then abduct a cab driver and his passenger in order to use his car as a getaway vehicle.

The remaining hour and a half alternates between the guys bitching about women while the hetero male fears about women come to life in monstrous proportions. The lead robber has just been divorced and is having custody battles over his son, whom he took on his robbery. The co-robber is a womanizer. The cab driver is having woman troubles. And, they all bitch about how evil women are. Soon enough, they arrive in the town filled with evil female witches from which they cannot escape.

The things that happen to them in the town are so over the top, it’s hard to tell if we’re meant to take any of this seriously. From a brother who is kept in a dungeon underneath the bar’s toilet to the coven trying to take over the world by creating an androgynous offspring who woman on the inside but man on the outside, Iglesia rides the line between satirizing male misogyny and indulging in it. Once everything is said and done, one would be forgiven for thinking he accomplished both.

The main issue is that Iglesia has defined the lines of the film as men vs women, but he still sets up the men as being relatable (Us) and the women as being the corrupting force (Them). The men are idiots, but they’re relatively virtuous idiots. The women are brilliant, but they’re evil. The Dead Alive esque finale sets up these men against all the mother of strong women, yet you’re not quite sure if Iglesia is still kidding.

The politics and misogyny Iglesia is spouting in Witching and Bitching are toxic yet vital. Especially in current times when the Mens Rights Activists are trying to out shout the modern Feminist movement, which can, at times, be as brutally off base as the MRA groups. Even though Iglesia first makes it out that the men are idiots, Iglesia makes everything they think come true. Is he making it outlandish because he is satirizing their opinions? Or, is he making it outlandish because everything he does is outlandish? I can’t come to a conclusion on it. There are equally good arguments on both sides.

Do you need to agree with a movie’s politics to enjoy it? If the movie is half made of politics, and half made of fun, then maybe? There’s a lot to enjoy outside of the sexual politics within. The movie is genuinely hilarious, it’s over the top, and it’s grotesque in every sense of the word. It moves at an amazingly fast pace, and it barely has any stall in it whatsoever.

Witching and Bitching is a movie that I seriously enjoyed, but with a lot of reservation. I’m still not sure if my reservations are all correct. It’s still worth seeing and discussing, because it’s a damned awesome movie otherwise.